Borghesia Mafiosa: Organized Crime, Media Branding, and Neoliberal Upper-Class Politics in Italy

Within neoliberal governance contexts, such as those shaping contemporary Italy, brands serves as powerful socio-cultural interfaces, extracting social and symbolic capital from the relational labour embedded in their media circulation and consumption. Socio-legally diverse members of the current Italian upper classes (including leaders of criminal organizations, members of the so-called 'mafia bourgeoisie,' enterpreneurs, professional politicians, and cadres of state-regulated civic institutions) increasingly rely on media self-branding, often involving the circulation of their public images, to establish forms of connective leadership over their audiences. As such, they engender dynamics of class privilege reproduction that diverge from the bureaucratised processes of power management historically involving the capitalist bourgeoisie. This paper ethnographically compares how licit and illicit Italian upper classes engage with media self-branding, examining their complementary roles in shaping neoliberal modalities of governmentality that, transcending any discursive dichotomy between formal and informal, influence the inner workings of the current Italian public sphere.